Damn. Just… oh, boy, someone’s got some splainin’ to do.
Caught on Camera: Containership Takes Out Crane in Busan, South Korea
Apr 072020
Apr 022020
So, the German-owned, Portuguese-flagged cruise ship RCGS Resolute was drifting, engine off, in the Caribbean doing some engine maintenance on March 30. No passengers on board. Then the Venezuelan patrol vessel ANBV Naiguatá decided to try to board and likely sieze the ship. Orders were made for the Resolute to surrender and sail to a Venezuelan port, orders the crew wisely refused. The Naiguatá then repeatedly rammed the Resolute. End result? The Naiguatá capsized and sank, the Resolute sailed on.
The Resolute, as it turns out, was built with an incredibly tough hull for the specific purposed of plowing through ice-packed Antarctic seas. It was built like a tank, essentially. *Why* the Venezuelans decided to take the cruise ship is a bit unclear, but “piracy” seems a good bet. Venezuela, being a socialist paradise, is all about stealing other peoples stuff. Most likely the goal was to ransom the cruise ship, and quite likely the crew as well.
This Venezuelan Patrol Ship Sunk Itself After Ramming A Cruise Liner With A Reinforced Hull
A glimpse into the future of the USS Bernie Sanders…
Dec 122019
Russia’s Accident-Plagued Aircraft Carrier Is On Fire
The Admiral Kuznetsov, which caught fire in 2009, and which had it’s floating dry dock sink underneath it right at a year ago, is on fire again.
I always thought that “Admiral Kuznetsov” translated into “Admiral Kuznetsov,” but maybe it actually means “Swamp Castle.”
Jul 142019
When it comes to aircraft diagrams, I’m all set. But ships are outside of my, ahem, wheelhouse. Nevertheless, I’m looking for accurate side-view diagrams of *big*ships, such as the Nimitz-class carrier and the largest oil tankers and container ships. Who can hook a brother up?
UPDATE:
Not perfect, but “shipbucket.com” falls securely into the “good enough” category for what I need for most of what I’m looking for.
Jun 102019
So, you’re a band in a shopping mall in Mexico, when all of a sudden the joint starts flooding (presumably due to rain bursting through the roof). What do you do? Why… you go out like a legend:
Jun 072019
We’ve all seen those entertaining dashcam videos out of Russia showing all manner of bad driving. But when it comes to drunken Russians steering all over the place, it’s not restricted to ice-covered Moscow streets, but also extends to the Philippine Sea. Here the USS Chancelorville was steaming in a straight line, recovering a helicopter, when the Russian destroyer Udaloy decided to nearly sideswipe it. Sure seems like maybe the US Navy needs to talk to Q and have him install some of those wheel-hub extendable drillbit things from the DB-5 under the waterlines of American vessels.
Jun 022019
… but this doesn’t seem quite right.
Venice, Italy, isn’t exactly at the top of my news feed, but I’ve heard numerous times that the city is full to overflowing with tourists, and the locals are sick of it. I have to imagine that this sort of thing will only raise the visibility of the issue.
I’ve virtually no interest in going to DisneyWorld, in no small part due to the fact that everything I’ve seen or heard suggests that the place is massively overcrowded. from Disney’s perspective, this is fine…the more people they can cram in, the more dollars they can get from them. But Disneyworld is a place *designed* for that specific purpose. Venice, on the other hand, is a city. People live there. If Disneyworld wanted to thin out the numbers, they could easily do so, since they control the entrances. They could limit the number of people allowed in. They could jack up the entrance fee even higher until people self-select for exclusion. But how would a city like Venice reduce the number of tourists? I suppose they could do something to stifle the flow of cruise ships, but tourists as a whole? When Europe cannot even seem to figure out how – or even if – to stop the flow of millions of colonizing invaders, it’s hard to see how a single city could legally keep people out.
Mar 232019
Vikings were well-known mariners, willing to sail their vessels across rough seas for the purpose of profit and adventure.
And then there’s the cruise ship “Viking Sky,” which has suffered engine failure off the coast of Norway and has lost stabilization. Kinda sucks since they’re in storm conditions.
WHEEEEEE!
The ship is *real* close to shore. On one hand, that’s good… short trips for the rescue choppers scooping up 1,300 passengers. on the other hand, the ship doesn’t need to drift too far to run aground. If it does so, it could tear out its bottom, especially if, as it looks likely, it runs aground on jagged rocks.
Mar 102019
And this time I’m not being sarcastic.
US ‘Gets Its Ass Handed To It’ In Wargames
In short: modern US Navy supercarriers are marvels of technology and engineering, and they are fantastically useful in peacetime. in wartime? Giant easily-sunk targets. F-22s and F-35s sweep the skies clean of enemy fighters, then get erased when they land back at the base.
The US goes for quality over quantity. The likes of Russia and China go for quantity over quality. But when it comes to offensive missiles, at a certain point “Chinese quality” is “good enough.” A relatively cheap ballistic missile can be produced in substantial numbers by the likes of China, and even without a nuclear warhead such a missile would be perfectly capable of holing a carrier or trashing an airbase. And the US has done fark-all about building up the sort of anti-missile capability that we need.
And then there’s the easily smashed command and control system, which the Chinese can likely turn into a vast field of blue screens of death with relative ease.
The Russians and the Chinese cannot conquer the US. But they could conquer, say, the South China Sea or Eastern Europe by taking America’s terribly expensive and terribly undefended local resources out of the fight in short order. If this is demonstrated *anywhere,* it is probably safe to assume that the whole world order will collapse overnight.
Jan 022019
‘Sink two aircraft carriers’: Chinese Admiral’s chilling recipe to dominate the South China Sea
On the one hand, the idea that an Asian power would cause the US to let them do whatever they want if they only took out some US Navy ships up front has been tried before. On the other hand:
In his speech, he said there were ‘five cornerstones of the United States’ open to exploitation: their military, their money, their talent, their voting system — and their fear of adversaries.
He’s not exactly wrong. Still… I *suspect8 that if China decides to take out a few US supercarriers, they’ll quickly find themselves in one hell of a war. I suspect it could easily go nuclear.